Government regulation is pushing the small local doctor practice to work for big companies. Hospitals in my area have been consolidating for years and this really accelerated in the past few years. We no longer use the doctor's office we have gone to for 10 years because they are part of a large "company" and the doctor turnover was pretty high. What broke the camels back was my wife went to the office to get a short of an overseas trip. I went to the same office for the same reason but I was billed several hundred dollars for a "consultation" vs a shot. We could not get the office to change the billing.
Obviously, some nim rod in the office wrote down the wrong code but they could not/would not change the billing. Fine. We can, at least for now, change doctors. <Insert Middle Finger Emoticon> :laughing::laughing::laughing:
The current doctor is an old "country" doctor. I doubt we will be with him long before he retires. He is what a doctor SHOULD Be....
We used to go to a really good bone cracker but we stopped going to him because his billing was a mess. :confused2: The office just could not get the bills right. We could never tell if this was because he was too cheap to hire competent staff or if the administrative overhead forced him to try to do the work himself. He was CONSTANTLY complaining about paperwork and how he wanted to go work for a larger practice that could afford people to handle the paper work. I think this is the new normal for doctors AND patients. My wife was working on health care bills last night and she makes at least one call a week to service providers about billing issues.
Unfortunately, we have quite a bit of experience with the health care system. The billing sucks and it is getting worse. I am not talking about costs, just dealing with the paperwork. Most of our billing issues are in the doctors offices and not with the so called evil insurance companies. In fact, we have a contact at our insurance company that helps us out when things go bad. We have constant billing issues with the service providers and we have had ID theft from one doctors office.
It is apparent that government regulation is pushing for a consolidation of service providers into ever bigger organizations while more revenue is given to insurance companies under ***** Care.
What is ironic is reading about people cruising the world, in out of the way places, getting good quality health care for very little money when they need the care. The health care quality is good, service fast, and prices reasonable if not cheap.
Later,
Dan
